Practical was a nine, only missing a perfect score because of the commute to London. That wasn’t such a bad thing. Best of both worlds. Call it ten. Claire and I had the domestic arrangements down pat. The absence of children might have been a problem in some other dimension, but not here.
Intellectual: the job was keeping me sharp and I had a mind-exercising pastime with the pub quiz. Claire was a smart, rational and pragmatic partner. The issue of moving overseas was a case in point. She had taken my request for time to think about it at face value, rather than making an argument of it. Couldn’t do much better: another ten.
Sexual: Better than it had been for years. Did it matter that some of the stimulation might have been coming from outside? It was fantasy—any sex therapist would acknowledge the role of fantasy in spicing up the routine of a long-term relationship. I might well be doing the same thing for Angelina and Charlie.
Emotional: Claire and I had a connection, but most of it was under Practical. I could not deny that the emotional side had faded with the years and our failure to have a family. Surely that happens to everyone, but for us it had never been easy, because of Claire’s background. I had filled the gap in my own life with music, but doing so involved memories of a past that had come alive again. If the wall between fantasy and reality broke down—if I became romantically involved with the present-day Angelina—I would be in the same position as Randall and Mandy, with all the rest counting for nought.
19
The first crack in the wall dividing fantasy from reality appeared an hour after we got home on the Sunday night. I checked my email and there was a message from Angelina, sent the previous day. All of her earlier messages, bar that one wassup? from her phone, had been sent on Wednesday evenings.
Have you got Skype?
I emailed back:
Yes, but I can’t use it at work.
I thought that would be the end of it, but the next morning there was a reply.
Doesn’t have to be in working hours. I’m by myself this week. What’s your user name? Mine’s The-Angelina-Brown.
Cop that, Equal Opportunity Commissioner Brown and Newspaper Columnist Brown and all the other Angelina Browns around the world. The former actress from Mornington Police is The Angelina Brown. I emailed back.
Mine’s Nine-Inch-Pianist
I hope you don’t use it for work
It’s my hand span
I’m sure it’s that too. Seriously, people get fired for less. Rightly so
I’m having you on. It’s Bee-Flat
Later this morning your time? Or now?
At work in London. But home tomorrow. 10 p.m. your time OK?
Perfect. xxx
Tuesday at 1 p.m. in Norwich, I logged on to Skype. My location was still registered as The Netherlands from a trip to The Hague for work a few years earlier. I had not bothered with an avatar.
Angelina had a photo—a glamorous professional head shot. It would be ludicrous to say she had not changed, but she was immediately recognisable. I had only two pictures of her. One was the shot with Richard in the long-faded newspaper clipping that Jacinta had sent me. The other was Shanksy’s photo of her singing by the piano, his gift to me on the December morning when I caught the plane home. They had become so familiar that they no longer spoke to me.
Now I saw her again. She was older, but that made the image more compelling. I was looking at the real person that I was about to speak to, not some fantasy from the distant past. She had cut her long hair and her face had lost some of its youthful plumpness, if that’s the right word, but it was by no means sharp. It just made her eyes bigger.
The Skype photo marked the beginning of the ghost behind the email messages taking on flesh and becoming not only a real person but the person I had known two decades earlier.
I went for a jog—out to eight miles now—and took a hard look at myself after the shower. My plan was not to show myself on Skype, but if the offer was You show me you and I’ll show you me, I wanted to take it up. It was only my face, I reminded myself, which looked like that of a forty-nine-year-old contract database architect. At least I did not need my glasses to read the screen. But there was one easy improvement I could make.
Scissors. Razor.
My chin looked a bit weak, as it does when you shave your beard after becoming accustomed to it. On the positive side, my face looked clean, professional and distinctly younger. Straight nose, clear complexion, clear eyes. A full head of hair, with not a lot of grey amid the black.
At 10.40 p.m. Melbourne time, I gave up waiting for Angelina to call and hit the voice call button. No video. One thing at a time.
She answered, also without video. There was a short pause, then her voice in the speakers, clearer than a phone. She could have been in the room with me.
‘Do you know “Because the Night” by Patti Smith?’
Her voice was perhaps a little deeper, but it was unmistakably hers. It took me a moment to realise she was repeating the first words she had ever spoken to me, words that I had responded to in the accent that had given her reason to invent the Bring a Brit invitation and…
‘And Bruce Springsteen,’ I said. ‘They wrote it together.’
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘You sound so…unchanged.’
‘So do you.’
I wanted time to slow down, slow right down and stop. This could never happen again, this reconnection after so long. It was a huge step forward from messaging, a completely different experience. Perhaps she felt the same way, because the link went silent.
I turned my back to the computer, switched my keyboard on and unplugged the headphones. I had not planned this, but it felt right. Though I was not going to attempt ‘Because the Night’.
I played Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, the song I was playing when she walked up to the piano that first night in the bar. I sang the opening words, asking where we had gone, what had happened to us when the rain came, and was overcome with a flood of nostalgia—for her, for Shanksy pulling me a beer, for the version of me that sang at a piano. It was a million miles away from the flirtation of our earlier exchanges.
I had to stop singing for a few bars to pull myself together. When I picked up again, my voice was shaky.
I finished the song and half expected to find she had hung up, but the connection was still open. She spoke first.
‘Oh my God—it just takes me right back. Do you remember the day we drove to the beach at Point Addis and walked all that way with the picnic basket?’
‘And it rained.’
‘That’s what the song reminded me of. And we were huddled under that overhang of rock…’
We went on for an hour and a half, revisiting the things we had done, things I had not thought about for years. We were talking about events rather than feelings, but memories of how we felt, how we had been, sat behind all of them. There was just one reference to current times, or at least post-Australian times.
‘You didn’t have children,’ she said.
‘Not through lack of trying.’
‘I’m sorry. When you said “no children” in your email, I thought…’
‘No. But I’m not sure we would even have tried if it hadn’t been for what you said to me that Christmas. So thank you.’
‘Except—’
‘No. Thank you. It was better to have tried.’
I realised it was true only as I said it. I had long acknowledged that Claire’s and my focus on a family had been at the expense of our own relationship. But if I had never stepped up and tried, encouraged Claire, our relationship would have suffered in a different way. And we would have been the less for not facing our fears.
Finally, she said, ‘Remember the night at the bar? When Shanksy bought us a bottle of champagne?’
The night I told her I loved her. And she told me she loved me.
I said, ‘Like it was yesterday.’
A long pause and then: ‘We were so young.’
The tw
o of us said nothing for about a minute, and it seemed the right time to hang up. I went to click on the red button and saw that she had already gone.
20
The next day, I was back in London and Angelina’s email was waiting from me when I knocked off for lunch.
I’d had a couple of drinks last night. Hope I didn’t sound too sloshed.
I emailed back: That’ll explain the story about the pool cleaner.
I told you that one? He was very cute.
Then: Pleased to see you haven’t lost the accent.
Does it still have the same effect?
What effect ;-)
It was the same sort of banter as a week earlier, but it didn’t feel the same. I could hear and see the woman behind the words. The genie was out of the bottle.
Whether or not it had been true before, I now had to acknowledge that I was having an affair, with a flesh and blood person in the present time. There was a simple test that Stuart had alluded to, and which had applied from the start: I was being as secretive about it as if we had been renting a hotel room.
I suppose there are people who could go on indefinitely deceiving their partner and themselves, but I was not one of them. I had to make a choice. The choice was between a bit of transgressive fun that had little prospect of becoming anything more, and a twenty-year relationship, a twenty-year life, with a house and friends and coffee in bed in the morning, the life that I had recently rated as travelling well in at least three out of four dimensions.
It took me longer to sort it out than it should have. Our email exchanges were giving me the mojo for everything else and I did not want to lose them. I could give up any time I wanted: just not this week.
The resolution came from an unexpected quarter. My recent pub-quiz performances had been stellar, despite work getting in the way of research.
We were running neck and neck with the pub champions, and the guest MC had loaded up the rock ’n’ roll questions. I was carrying the team. Sheilagh had been doing it hard for the past couple of weeks, but she seemed brighter on this night.
I had kept us in the race with a challenge on wine-bottle sizes: a Bordeaux jeroboam is different from a champagne jeroboam.
Last question, scores tied. This one’s for you, Adam.
Bob Dylan has written the same woman’s name into two different songs at least once. What is the name?
No idea. I don’t know many Dylan songs after the 1970s, and the man is still churning out albums. The way the question was framed suggested that there might be more than one possibility and that Dylan may not have recorded the songs himself. I dug into my memory as the discussion went around the table. Sara, his first wife, subject of the eponymous song, was the favourite.
‘“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is about her, too,’ said Stuart.
‘The question says name. Her name’s not in the song.’
We did a rapid dump: Ramona, Johanna, Louise, Maggie, Lucy, Nellie, Ruth from Duluth, Jeannie, Rosie, Hazel, Ophelia, Claudette, Marie, Patty Valentine from ‘Hurricane’, Valerie and Vivienne (T. S. Eliot’s two wives), Mary-Jane, Queen Jane, Queen Anne, Lily, Rosemary, Cinderella…No duplicates.
‘Angelina,’ I added.
‘Farewell Angelina’ was a sixties song. It was pretty enough, but not romantic, except for the name. Dylan had written it for Joan Baez to sing.
We were in trouble. ‘Sara’ was the obvious choice, so avoid that. Surely not Ophelia or Hazel or Claudette. It was up to me. I went with the idea that he had written at least one of the songs for someone else. And a bit of nostalgia.
Nobody knew that the name meant anything to me, so there were no guffaws or snide remarks. And ‘Angelina’ it was—subject and title of a song recorded in 1981 but not released until 1991.
I was wrong about Dylan not recording ‘Farewell Angelina’: his version had been included on the same compilation of rarities. Details, details. We had the point.
The champions had gone for Rosemary, but an appeal to the official Dylan website established that the Rosemary of ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ was spelled differently from the Rose-Marie of ‘Going to Acapulco’.
Our win was brilliant but inconvenient, as the prize was free drinks. I had promised to be home for dinner. Since the Lake District hike, Claire and I had been eating together, even when one of us was late. But I had to share the celebration and sink a pint of the winnings. Fifteen minutes wouldn’t matter.
When it turned to thirty, and the house band was tuning up, I said, ‘Have to dash’ and walked out with Sheilagh, who put her arms around me when she kissed me goodnight, then started crying. Her marriage was over. I held her for a while and kissed her again on the forehead. When I let go Claire was parked next to us in the car.
I climbed in and didn’t say anything.
Claire—logical, pragmatic and a good judge of behaviour—won most of our arguments and I took some pleasure in turning the tables occasionally. There had been a kitchen cupboard door with a broken hinge that could only be closed by a complex sequence involving another cupboard and an up-down-up manipulation. Claire was constantly on my case to fix it, and eventually she blew up and told me she was going to call in a handyman. At which point I demonstrated that the door could be closed in the conventional way, having fixed it some weeks earlier. It was my Ye of little faith metaphor. Remember the hinge?
I was waiting for Claire to bite, so I could proffer my innocent explanation. And in future, I could say Remember the affair with Sheilagh? and we would laugh. At least, one of us would.
Except Claire stayed quiet. I thought at first that she must have decided there was nothing to it. Then the silence dragged on, and I realised that she was thinking about it, putting the pieces together and deciding how to respond.
If I was ever going to come clean with Claire about Angelina, now was the time. The reality fell short of what Claire might be imagining with Sheilagh: three-times-a-week clandestine meetings covered by a farrago of lies.
The unvarnished truth: A girlfriend from twenty years ago in Australia got in touch, and we exchanged a few emails and had a chat on Skype. I’ve decided it’s not a good idea, and I won’t be doing it again. I should have told you earlier, but I’m telling you now. Sorry. But it’s not nearly as bad as what you were thinking.
In the unlikely event that Claire wanted to know how I felt about it all…Well, that would not be a bad thing. We could do with more conversations of that kind.
‘Claire…’
‘Adam, if you’re going to promise there’s absolutely nothing going on, then say it. If not, I don’t want to discuss anything until we get home.’
I could have given her a flat-out denial, but it would have been disingenuous. There was something going on, and it was time to clear the air. When Claire was ready.
Claire parked the car, made herself a cup of tea and sat at the dining table. I opened a beer, just to have something in my hand, and sat opposite.
‘I gather you’ve been seeing someone. No?’
She had given me my chance in the car and now did not wait for an answer. And it seemed she had not recognised Sheilagh.
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘You know I’ve been looking at moving to the States. I’m assuming that if I do, you won’t follow me. Which would mean the end of us as a couple. I think we both understood that, but I’m making it explicit.’
I just nodded. This wasn’t about Sheilagh or Angelina anymore.
‘And we’ve both been letting it sit, letting our relationship hang on whether or not a business deal goes through. Is that fair—what I’m saying?’
‘It’s fair,’ I said. ‘And you haven’t been taking our relationship into account in deciding whether to sell the company. Is that fair?’
She thought for a few moments before replying. ‘No, it’s not. You don’t know because we’ve never discussed it properly. It might have been true a few months ago, but what I haven’t understood is why things have change
d lately. I thought it must have been the job, but now you’ve given me the answer.’ She looked hard at me. ‘Are you hearing me?’
‘You’re saying it’s over?’ I said.
She wasn’t, but it was where the conversation was heading, and it was there already in her tone.
‘I think you’re the one who’s made that choice,’ she said.
‘It seems you’d made the decision already.’
‘I think we had. But you could have had the decency to…’ She sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
She was right. It didn’t matter. Explaining about Sheilagh and Angelina at this point would not solve the deeper problem that was now out in the open. And I could tell, despite her appearance of control, that Claire had exhausted her capacity for discussion. We put dinner in the fridge.
In my room, I lay on the bed in the dark. Despite what we had said, the situation was not beyond saving, if we both cared enough. If either of us cared enough. Claire only had to say, ‘You’re more important than the deal, so we’ll stay in the UK.’ Or I could say, ‘I’ll go to the States.’ But why would I say that if Claire didn’t value our relationship enough to make the equivalent offer?
Rather than turn on the light, I lit the candle. Then I switched on my computer and downloaded the Dylan song that had given me my moment of glory.
I know lots of songs. I don’t just know their names so I can score points in quizzes, I know the songs themselves. The likelihood of me being blown away by one I have not heard before is extremely low.
That said, I was in an emotionally receptive mood. The candle that had burned as a young Angelina’s voice filled the Myer Music Bowl more than twenty-two years earlier lit my room. I had drunk an extra pint after being on a reduced-alcohol regime for the past few weeks. Not to mention that I was on the verge of splitting with my partner of twenty years, in part because of a woman whose name was the title of the song.